Steam, the biggest digital game distribution service on PC, has broken its concurrent user record over the weekend, coinciding with the launch of Capcom’s Monster Hunter Wilds, exceeding 40 million players for the first time.
Following its previous record of 39,924,077 peak players set at the start of February this year, the platform has now attained an all-time peak of 40,270,997 concurrent players as of two days ago, according to SteamDB. These figures come as no surprise, as the platform has been steadily growing its player numbers every month since October last year, gaining more than two million players in the time period.
While a majority of its 40 million player count consists of idle users who only have Steam open in the background, its actual in-game player peak has also seen an increase, although not as drastically, with a more than 500,000 increase since the start of February setting a new record of 12.8 million concurrent in-game players.
Both of Steam’s latest records are likely set due to the release of Monster Hunter Wilds, which broke records of its own by becoming Capcom’s biggest launch ever, with an all-time peak count of 1,384,608 concurrent players at the time of writing, even surpassing massive free-to-play titles like Dota 2 and Marvel Rivals to attain second place on the platform’s most-played charts, although its reigning champion Counter-Strike 2 still remains strong with a 24-hour and all-time peak count of 1.5 million and 1.8 million concurrent players respectively.
Despite its already strong standing, Steam numbers will no doubt continue to rise over the coming month due to massive upcoming releases like Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Shadows and the highly anticipated Sims competitor inZOI, which are sure to draw more PC players to the platform to hit even larger milestones.
Kevin is a reformed PC Master Race gamer with a penchant for franchise “duds” like Darksiders III and Dead Space 3. He has made it his life-long mission to play every single major game release – lest his wallet dies trying.
Si Jia
Joey Leong
